A hollow referendum

Instead of articulating a brand-new direction
for the country, the referendum simply served to legitimize and
solidify the powers that President Erdogan has held since July 2016.

A man casts his vote at a polling station in Istambul, Turkey, 16 April 2017. Picture by Michael Kappeler/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Turkey’s presidential
referendum this past Sunday fundamentally changed the constitution for the first time since the country’s founding in
1923. For months,
polls have monitored the fluctuations in popular support for the
proposed presidential system and experts have offered a range of
perspectives on the referendum's implications.

Although the referendum
represents a fundamentally novel articulation of the country’s
constitution, unlike many other experts I would argue that this referendum
was ultimately, hollow. Instead of articulating a brand-new direction
for the country, it simply served to legitimize and
solidify the powers that President Erdogan has held since July 2016.

A deep state of intolerance

Erdogan’s repeated articulation
of the ambiguous “deep
state” and its fundamental threat to Turkey’s
self-determination has helped the leader to legitimize crack-downs
against the opposition since the Ergenekon
investigations in 2007. The case was originally seen by many as a
monumental step toward civilian control over the military for a
country plagued by a history of military coups. However, this
accomplishment was clouded by an unfair trial and circumstantial
evidence of a supposed coup plot in 2004.

Following the Ergenekon
investigations, it is this idea of the “deep state” which
continued to justify
the leading party’s crackdown on journalists, civilian officials
and the military. The Gezi Park protests
in 2013 showcased Erdogan's intolerance towards the opposition. The peaceful protests quickly became
violent following the heavy-handed actions of police that ultimately
resulted
in the injury of 8,000 and the death of eight. The subsequent
dismissal of
journalists for their coverage of the protests served as a clear
warning against coverage which made Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, look bad. All this seems like
a light-hearted reaction in comparison to the shutdown
of 15 independent media outlets in October 2016.

Additionally, the party has also
lead several constitutional changes since, which have slowly chipped
away at the country’s more-democratic constitution. For example, a
security
bill introduced in December 2015 substantially increased the
power of the police in place of the military, and also considerably
limited civilian rights to protest. Fundamentally, the bill allowed
police to use deadly force during violent protests, detain
demonstrators and to conduct warrantless searches on individuals,
representing a fundamental blow to the right to protest and another
key step towards removing the voice of the opposition.

A presidential vision

The seed for Erdogan’s new
Turkish constitution is not recent, but instead became the foundation
of the leading party’s campaign ahead of the 2015 general election.
The AKP’s subsequent loss of the majority in parliament represented
the first obstacle to achieving his presidential vision. The historic
election of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)
represented the greatest challenge to the AKP’s power since its
first election in 2002.

Losing the majority required that AKP lawmakers work with an opposition party to pass any meaningful
legislation, let alone attempt to sell their vision of a presidential
system. But when this proved difficult, July’s coup against
President Erdogan proved to be a more powerful tool.

Assassination of the
opposition

It was under
the state
of emergency that Erdogan carefully worked to gag the opposition
and mobilize support for the presidential referendum. Increasing
destabilization within the country due to a spillover of violence
from Syria, ISIS terror attacks, and a renewed fight with PKK
militants also helped Erdogan make the case for a consolidation of
power. In the absence of meaningful criticism from the west, the
systematic de-legitimization of any opposition since July 2016 was
surely the writing on the wall.

Supporters of
Fethullah Gulen, the supposed orchestrator of July’s coup, were
silenced through the mass-detentions and dismissals of known and
merely suspected supporters, sometimes with ties so insignificant as
merely holding a bank account with Bank
Asya, a bank with ties to the Gulen movement.

The HDP was
silenced through the systematic detention of leaders and local MPs
due to largely unsubstantiated claims of these officials' collusion
with the PKK. In the southeast, the AKP replacements
of the HDP officials have effectively left the majortity-Kurdish population with no
elected representation and arguably helps to intimidate the
population into submission for fear that they will otherwise be
targeted as ‘terrorist’ supporters.

The number of
dismissals
and suspensions of individuals across all public sectors now amasses
a number somewhere near 100,000. The sheer number of those affected
by either the suspensions or the arrests has effectively instituted a
wide-spread fear among locals of speaking out against the government
for fear of being targeted themselves. Then, just in case the
political war was not effective enough on its own, Erdogan further
quieted the Kurdish majority population in the southeast by ramping
up security operations, rendering some villages like Sirnak literally
flattened
to the ground leaving the locals with nothing more than rubble and
tree stumps to identify their homes.

In order to
quiet the effect of the CHP and the MHP, the president has used a
different tactic. MHP leader Bahceli - whose popularity as the
representative of his own party has waned so significantly that
contenders tried to replace him in May of last year - is colloquially
said to have made a ‘presidency-for-presidency’
deal with Erdogan for maintained power, which would explain his
pro-AKP rhetoric.

The CHP, a
more vocal opponent to the government and some of its more recent
un-democratic decrees, though not targeted to the extent of the HDP,
has also experienced the hard hand of the government. At the end of
last year, Erdogan launched a criminal complaint against its leader
Kemal Kilicdaroglu for insulting
the President and has made recent allegations that the leader ‘ran
away’ on the night of the coup in order to delegitimize the
party in the eyes of the population. Though it is unclear whether
these attacks are enough to intimidate the CHP leader into submission
like Bahceli, it is safe to say that the President has made it clear
that opposition comes at a price.

Brazen manipulation

Though the outcome of the
referendum will simply allow the president to maintain the same
powers as he had under a state of emergency, it does seem to have
officially ushered in the end of Turkey’s democracy.

Though the country has always
been made-up of a more conservative population than the west tends to
acknowledge, (the country’s Anatolian region is starkly different
from its peripheral cities) it had never before experienced
unfair or unfree elections. However, the undemocratic manipulation of
approximately 2,500,000 ‘yes’ ballots demonstrates the final nail
in the coffin of what was Turkish democracy.

An election observer noted
that as many as 2,500,000 ballots, accepted without official stamps,
were added to the official count. If the allegations are true, these
ballots would have nearly doubled Erdogan’s margin of victory in
the official reports. The government’s subsequent 90-day renewal of
a state of emergency and the dismissal
of criticism are telling signs. These allegations, coupled with the
state of emergency under which the referendum was held, the
incredible degree of political pressure on the opposition, along with
other concerns over access to polling stations throughout the country,
make it hard to imagine how this referendum could ever be perceived
as fair.

Conclusion

The referendum merely solidified
the powers Erdogan has enjoyed as president under the state of
emergency since July 2016. When looking to the country’s future,
the past nine months will act as a good indicator of the kind of
leader Erdogan will be and fundamentally, the president’s power
will remain the same.

However, Erdogan’s incredibly
narrow
margin of victory (51.2%), even with 2,500,000 possibly fraudulent
ballots speaks volumes of the president’s declining command over
the diverse Turkish population and a fundamental shift in their approval of him. The sheer declaration of the opposition, even amidst the
fear of widespread arrests and government retaliation is truly
remarkable. In the coming months it will be critical to observe how
Erdogan and his party rule over an increasingly divided society,
which will undoubtedly present enduring challenges to his rule.

About the author

Melissa DeOrio holds an MSc in Security Studies from University College London and a degree in Political Science from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University. Melissa lived in Samsun, Turkey from 2014-2015 as a Fulbright scholar and frequently analyzes Turkish political affairs.

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